Go Ask Alice
by hlaron
Summary: Jill watching Alice: A summary of Resident Evil 2 from a slightly different perspective.


"One pill makes your larger, and one pill makes you small.

… Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall."

Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"

Jill Valentine respects two things. The first is efficiency. The second is theatricality. So when Alice crashes through the window of the cathedral that she was about to die in, on a motorcycle, and dispatches three Lickers within thirty seconds and with absolutely no difficulty, she has to grit her teeth to stop her jaw from dropping.

A few minutes later when Alice points a gun at Peyton with the full and immediate intention of shooting him in the head, Jill reacts without thinking in drawing her own. But Alice has a second one trained on her throat before she's halfway there, and Jill feels a very unfamiliar spike of fear dart up her chest. The words spoken are unimportant, and she walks forward until the gun is pressed unwaveringly against her neck because her fear demands it.

The creatures bursting out of their impermanent graves around them it is actually a relief.

Before things became complicated, before public telephones began ringing just as they passed, Jill already finds herself unable to take her eyes off Alice. Alice sees this. Alice sees everything.

"What are you staring at?" she asks.

"I'm not sure," Jill replies. She finds herself wondering where Alice's left pants-leg has gone. Its absence is distracting.

They are given their mission and their price of escape, which is to rescue a child named Sophie. A few minutes later machine-gun fire leaves Peyton as a bleeding, gasping mess, then just a mess, and then Alice is gone, after Nemesis, leaving Jill with only the weatherwoman for company. A few minutes later Peyton comes back to kill her, as Alice said he would. She has to close her eyes before she can squeeze the trigger, an act normally as natural to her as breathing, and as she does so Alice's curiously cracked voice whispers to her again. She tries to ignore it.

"They did something to me. I barely even feel human anymore."

Her ears still ringing from the gunshot, Jill Valentine wishes that the same were true of her.

In the school, the man wearing the bullet-proof vest and carrying the MP5 submachine, whose name she later discovered to be Carlos, bursts into the canteen, smiling like a corpse and moving like an immortal, actually catching Alice off-guard, and Jill feels another unfamiliar emotion forcing its way through her chest like a lunatic shard of bone. She tries to attribute it to what has just happened to the man who had introduced himself as Sergeant Nicholai Genovev, whose screams were still resounding in her ears. She is not successful.

Jill, on her knees with her hands bound, watches Alice fight the seven-foot tall stack of muscle and mutagens that is Nemesis, forced to by the Umbrella man's obscene test. She watches Alice defend herself desperately, her counter-attack, and then as she pins Nemesis to the iron support's protruding shard like some grotesque wingless insect. She sees Alice wail and beat ineffectually on Nemesis's massive chest, sees her staring into Nemesis's single and all too human blue eye. She sees her refuse to kill him. She recognises Alice's discovery that she still feels something of humanity after all.

Nemesis pulls himself free with a grunt of pain and turns on his creators, providing a maelstrom of violence in which the rest of them to can escape that place in the helicopter. As the air blast from the sterilisation of the necropolis that was once Racoon City sends the helicopter careening towards the ground, Jill observes with terrible fatality the pipe swing lethally across towards Sophie, and knows what's about to happen before it does. Before Alice moves with her unnatural speed to dive in front of Sophie, before the pipe impales her instead of the child, Jill is already mourning her.

When they learn that Alice's body was found by Umbrella, and that she is, somehow, not dead, they make arrangements.

Jill steps out of the black PsiOps SUV into the pouring rain, on an almost empty street in the middle of a rubber-stamp Midwest city. The others remain inside. In the middle distance she sees a figure approach, clad only in a soaked white hospital smock. It is Alice. Jill stares at her, and now Alice stares back. Neither speaks. Alice moves to the car and gets into the back seat on the opposite side. A moment later Jill joins her. The car drives away from the compound and is absorbed into the dark streets, its lights merge with street lamps and traffic lights, and it's gone.


End file.
